 Three Strikes—You’re Dead! edited
by Donna Andrews, Wildside
Press, 2024 Three Strikes—You’re Dead! is an enjoyable collection of fourteen sports-themed tales with an impressive variety—the stories range from baseball to ultimate frisbee to bull riding and from whodunit to hardboiled—with nary a dud. Alan S. Orloff’s wonderful “Murder at Home” is an almost impossible crime about a murder during a televised baseball playoff game. The victim, P.J. “Bulldog” Johnson, is universally disliked, which means everyone has a motive, but (fortunately for Rick Baines, an assistant hitting coach tapped by the team’s General Manager to crack the case) the suspects are limited to the players celebrating Bulldog’s ninth inning game winning run at home plate. “The Ultimate Bounty Hunter,”
by Sherry Harris, is a clever and humorous tale about a bounty hunter,
Elspeth Mead—“El to my friends. Ellie to my frenemies”—tracking a financial
fraudster for failing to appear at his bond hearing. El’s only qualifications
for the gig is a high-powered defense attorney mother and an unquenchable
love for Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum mysteries. El gets her man, but
it’s not as easy as Ms. Plum makes it look. “Punch-Drunk,” by William Ade, is
a hardboiled pleasure about a near-retirement detective trying to clear a
boxer who killed his opponent in the ring. The conclusion is surprising and
just right. Adam Meyer’s “Double Fault” is
a different kind of mystery—one where the reader gets to watch the crime
unfold—about an unemployed tennis pro getting his due. “Of Mice and
(Murdered) Men,” by Rosalie Spielman, is as much fantasy as mystery since the
main player is a girl with the ability to shapeshift into anything she wants
to be. But when she witnesses a murder, without ever seeing the perp, she is
in a hard place because she was a mouse trying to steal the answers to a test
when it happened. Barb Goffman’s “A Matter of
Trust,” is a tasty treat about jelly donuts, bicycling, and lies. Oh, and
there is a murder and a bunch of clear-eyed irony, too. My favorite story in
the collection, “And Now, an Inspiring Story of Tragedy Overcome,” by Joseph
S. Walker, has a hardboiled attitude and a wholesome take on family
obligation and love. It is about competitive figure skating and organized
crime. Also included are terrific stories by Smita Harish Jain, Kathryn
Prater Bomey, Robin Templeton, and Maddi Davidson. |
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Click here to
purchase the Kindle edition or here for the paperback at Amazon. |
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